Of the large number of Christie's works it is difficult to choose the most important, but a few have attracted more attention than others. The short story "The Three Blind Mice," which later became a successful stage play, originated as a radio play in 1946, and was published in 1950 in a collection called The Mousetrap and Other Stories.

It is an excellent example of Christie's use of a closed setting, in this case a snowbound manor house, and of her ability to abandon her famous amateur detectives when she wanted. Similar is And Then There Were None (1939), Christie's classic tale based on the rhyme "Ten Little Indians" in which ten people, in a large house on an island, are murdered one by one.

Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937) are two of the most famous Poirot novels and good examples of Christie's very...